Distraction

Period six, again. My head is pounding at the end of a long day, in the middle of a long week. The last two weeks of school seem long to students, but I never thought they would seem so long now. With so much to do, I expected time to fly. Days like this one crawl by endlessly, as I repeat lessons two, four, or even six times in just a few hours. Only the students change, whirling through the library classroom as I try to catch up. Usually, I can keep pace, but today I am tired.

Four students sit at the table with me, their spiral notebooks open to a page about the censorship of rap music. They have read the page five times already. I have read it twenty times. I am weary, and so are they, the cycles of this class grown old and weary at the end of the year. I give them cursory instructions, and they sigh and begin to write in the notebooks.

I quickly return to the business from which my students interrupted me when the bell rang. I had been poring, absorbed, over their test scores. The intimidating WASL test, the test for which I was hired to prepare them, had been taken, graded, and returned to me, their teacher, before the students themselves. I do not like secrets much, especially from them, but in order to have all the information I scan the badly formatted Excel spreadsheet, searching for familiar names, hoping to discern happy futures for them from among the rows of letters and numbers.

For several minutes, I hunch into the paper, lost and unaware that the four students have long finished the task I assigned them. They gaze off in all directions, fidget, begin to flip open phones or doodle on the desk. I look up, distracted, and glance over their books. The answers are in disarray, and I see where they have gotten lost, mistakes that could have been avoided had they, as they deserved, had a teacher to help them. Ashamed, I put away the spreadsheet, once again worried by the statement I've accidentally made, ignoring the live students in front of me, the lesson of the day, to gaze at faraway standards, at the futures none of us control now. The test scores are important, I know, but they can be nowhere near as important to me, right now, as the hands, faces, and minds that earned them.